GNU Emacs is the most popular and widespread of the Emacs family of editors. It is also the most powerful and flexible. Unlike all other text editors, GNU Emacs is a complete working environment—you can stay within Emacs all day without leaving.

, 3rd Edition tells readers how to get started with the GNU Emacs editor. It is a thorough guide that will also "grow" with you: as you become more proficient, this book will help you learn how to use Emacs more effectively. It takes you from basic Emacs usage (simple text editing) to moderately complicated customization and programming.The third edition of

describes Emacs 21.3 from the ground up, including new user interface features such as an icon-based toolbar and an interactive interface to Emacs customization. A new chapter details how to install and run Emacs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, including tips for using Emacs effectively on those platforms.

, third edition, covers:

Learning GNU Emacs

Learning GNU Emacs

Learning GNU Emacs

• How to edit files with Emacs

• Using the operating system shell through Emacs

• How to use multiple buffers, windows, and frames

• Customizing Emacs interactively and through startup files

• Writing macros to circumvent repetitious tasks

• Emacs as a programming environment for Java, C++, and Perl, among others

• Using Emacs as an integrated development environment (IDE)

• Integrating Emacs with CVS, Subversion and other change control systems for projects with multiple developers

• Writing HTML, XHTML, and XML with Emacs

• The basics of Emacs Lisp

The book is aimed at new Emacs users, whether or not they are programmers. Also useful for readers switching from other Emacs implementations to GNU Emacs.

14.4.2 FAQ, News, and Antinews

Perhaps the most important of the remaining Emacs help commands for hard-core users and customizers is C-h n (for view-emacs-news), which visits the NEWS file that comes with Emacs. This file contains a history of changes made to Emacs since the last major version; for example, all changes in Version 20.1 and following up to the latest minor version (which in our case is Version 21.3.5, though the file says 21.4). This can be a very long file if there have been several minor releases since the last major version—in our case, the file is 12,886 lines long. If you want to look through it for changes to a specific aspect of Emacs, use an appropriate search command. But if you just want to skim it, note that this file was intended for use with outline mode: topics are introduced on lines beginning with *, and subtopics are introduced on lines beginning with **. Use outline mode commands to skim the file; see Chapter 7 for information. The outline mode command hide-body displays the main topics and hides the text; show-all redisplays all the text as well.

An entertaining approach to learning about the latest release is Antinews. This file takes the viewpoint that Emacs has been downgraded, in our case from 21.4 to 21.3. It takes you through all the features that have been ripped from Emacs 21.4 to create Emacs 21.3. Antinews is a menu item on the first page of the Emacs manual you reach via C-h r.